Yale Building Project

Project – New Haven, Connecticut, United States

1967 onwards

Yale Building Project is a compulsory part of the first year
architecture course at Yale University in which students design and
build their own structure. Seen as an early precursor to the
design-build studios that are more popular today in the US, such as
the BaSic Initiative,
URBANbuild and Design Workshop amongst
others, Yale's programme was the only one of its kind when it was
set up in 1967 by Charles Moore. Whilst the school already had a
fledgling design-build culture, with past students having built
houses for each other's families and ski chalets in one case, Moore
gave these activities an ethical dimension. Built in some of the
poorest areas of the USA, the programme exposed students to a kind
of poverty that many had not encountered before. Believing that
architectural education should be much more that the ability to
draw, Moore's tenure as chairman at Yale broke with the Beaux-Arts
tradition of students working on one-off buildings such as museums
and art galleries. Instead he focused on the everyday, on how to
design good quality and affordable buildings for dwelling. Although
Moore himself was crucial to the process, his vision sat well with
the politics of the 1960s and students' desire for a socially
relevant form of architecture, and they themselves were
instrumental in identifying many of the early sites and communities
for the projects.

Over the years, the basic teaching model has remained largely
unchanged with students working first individually and then in
groups to develop designs to a given brief in consultation with
residents. Later in the academic year, projects are judged by
clients and tutors and a single design is chosen to be worked on
collectively, drawn in detail and built. Students work in teams,
each group being responsible for a certain aspect of the project
with tutors acting as advisors. Since the inception of the
programme, projects have varied from early community buildings in
rural Appalachia, to more modest pavilion-type buildings in the
1980s that were the result of budget limitations, to recent
projects carried out in partnership with housing organisations such
as Habitat for Humanity and Neighbourhood
Housing Services. The type and nature of drawings produced
by students has also evolved, from the basic sketches that were
made for the first building to the full set of working drawings
produced today.

The pedagogical approach developed at Yale moves away from a
purely academic teaching system towards a model for learning based
on doing. Students take responsibility for the construction,
learning to work collaboratively, making collective decisions in a
process that is often chaotic and difficult. The emphasis on mutual
knowledge gained alongside fellow students, users and other
interested parties, teaches essential skills of negotiation and
frames architecture as a collective practice in contrast to
modernist notions of the individual architect.

Richard W. Hayes, The Yale Building Project: The First 40
Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

Quotes

It's a lesson in trust. Contrary to the cherished portrait of
the architecture student as conquering design hero who embraces
every opportunity for total design, our experience with the Yale
Building Project is exposing the importance of choosing one's
battles-knowing when to voice concerns and opinions, and when to
trust your peers to do their job and do it well.
- Mathew Zych, student at Yale Building Project; http://www.metropolismag.com/pov/20090504/the-yale-building-project-week-1-chaos-and-trust